Teaching and conducting Gestalt Research through the Istituto di Gestalt, HCC Italy: Capturing the vitality of relationships in research

In this paper, I would like to share my experience as a Gestalt therapy trainer for almost forty years now and relate how important research has been in my work. When I opened my institute with other colleagues in 1979, I came from a solid academic background and I loved Gestalt therapy. I had just turned 23 and, after graduating and working for two years as a university lecturer in Rome, I had moved back to Sicily, where there was certainly no tradition of the approach. The spirit of curiosity and creativity that underpins Gestalt therapy has always appealed to me, as much as the spirit of research. Moreover, as all of my family were mathematicians, statistics has always been in my blood.

Today I can say that research falls perfectly within the scope of the challenge that the founders set themselves–the challenge of creating a method that could describe and sustain the spontaneity of life, without depriving relationships of their vitality through diagnostic categories or interpretive practices (Perls et al., 1994). The most interesting research that Gestalt practitioners can pursue is that which confirms the validity of the core principal of our work, which is that therapy lies in supporting a spontaneity that the therapist grasps in the movement co-created with the client. I have sought to uphold this spirit in the training and research activities of my Institute.

I will begin with the Gestalt therapist’s encounter with training and research; that is, with a discussion of the particular experience of Gestalt training, which is phenomenological, aesthetic, and field-oriented. Then I will give a brief description of the underlying concepts of the approach and provide examples of related research. Psychopathology, the development of relational suffering, the therapeutic alliance, and other aspects will be examined from the point of view of research. What will emerge is how the aims of research cannot be severed from the actual purpose of psychotherapy, even though our approach was established for very different ends. I will then introduce the concept of aesthetic relational knowledge of the field and the concept of dnce steps as a proposed description of the attunement between the therapist and client, in line with new cultural forms of expression. Finally, I will present the cutting-edge research my Institute has done on dance steps and its clinical application.